Art - Overview
The National Museum of American History is not an art museum. But works of art fill its collections and testify to the vital place of art in everyday American life. The ceramics collections hold hundreds of examples of American and European art glass and pottery. Fashion sketches, illustrations, and prints are part of the costume collections. Donations from ethnic and cultural communities include many homemade religious ornaments, paintings, and figures. The Harry T Peters "America on Stone" collection alone comprises some 1,700 color prints of scenes from the 1800s. The National Quilt Collection is art on fabric. And the tools of artists and artisans are part of the Museum's collections, too, in the form of printing plates, woodblock tools, photographic equipment, and potters' stamps, kilns, and wheels.
"Art - Overview" showing 3 items.
Night of the Dead
- Description
- Though anchored in local Roman Catholic traditions, many of the religious beliefs and symbols of Mexican Americans have roots in indigenous notions about the soul and our universe. Between October 31st and November 2nd, Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is celebrated with family, decorating home altars and visiting the graves of loved ones. A holiday with much regional and individual variation, it is traditionally an occasion to commemorate parents and grandparents with altars of marigolds, candles, alcohol, skeleton-shaped sweets, and other foods and personal objects favored by the dearly departed. Day of the Dead celebrations were reinvented across many Mexican American communities beginning in the 1970s, as the Chicano movement promoted and readapted Mexican cultural practices. Many artists since then have seized on the visual power of the altar as a conduit for personal and public memory. In the United States, Day of the Dead altars can be found interrogating life and critiquing politics in public places. Contemporary Day of the Dead celebrations have memorialized those who have died from AIDS, gang violence, the civil wars in Central America, and crossing the border. This lithograph, titled Night of the Dead, was originally drawn in ink by Alan Crane in 1958. Alan Horton Crane (1901–1969) was a Brooklyn-born illustrator best known for his landscapes and genre scenes of life in Mexico and New England. This image is part of a series of prints by Alan Crane housed in the Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1958
- maker
- Crane, Alan
- ID Number
- GA*23836
- catalog number
- 23836
- accession number
- 306563
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Adiós Espalda Mojada
- Description
- For centuries in both Mexico and the United States, racism has organized society and regulated the work and aspirations of Europeans, Africans, Native peoples, and their mixed descendants. Though inhabiting segregated spaces, Mexican American communities expanded by the 1960s, stretching from the Yakima Valley of Washington to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, and into the Midwest, particularly Chicago. The people living in these towns and cities represented a mix of multigenerational U.S. citizens, new residents, and temporary Mexican workers. While their experiences varied, all these communities were shaped by a legacy of discrimination in school, housing, and employment. Economic exploitation, in the form of race-based wages and substandard working conditions, particularly in fields, mines, and factories, were their daily realities. Despite the participation of Mexican American soldiers in all major U.S. conflicts since the Civil War, and the contribution of Mexican workers to the American agricultural and mining economy (and the vast economy of the West generally), the citizenship and human rights of their communities were contested and continue to be today. This lithograph, titled Goodbye Wetback, was designed by artist B. Barrios and printed by Lynton Kistler in 1951 in Los Angeles. It depicts a rural Mexican family confronting, with a mix of fear and stoicism, the racist encounter implied in the title. Kistler printed the work of many artists, some of whom specifically depicted Latino, Native American, and East Asian subjects. Over 2,700 of his prints are housed in the Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History.
- ADD MORE SUBJECTS LIKE LATINO, IMMIGRATION, PREJUDICE
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1951
- Associated Date
- 1951
- printer
- Kistler, Lynton R.
- graphic artist
- Barrios, B.
- ID Number
- 1978.0650.0968
- accession number
- 1978.0650
- catalog number
- 1978.0650.0968
- 78.0650.0968
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Work and Rest
- Description
- The Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History houses an extensive series of prints by archeologist and artist Jean Charlot (1898–1979), and prominent Los Angeles printer Lynton Kistler (1897–1993). Charlot, the French-born artist of this print, spent his early career during the 1920s in Mexico City. As an assistant to the socialist painter Diego Rivera, he studied muralism, a Mexican artistic movement that was revived throughout Latino communities in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. This lithograph, titled Work and Rest contrasts the labor of an indigenous woman, grinding corn on a metate, with the slumber of her baby. Printed by Lynton Kistler in Los Angeles in 1956, it presents an image of a Mexican woman living outside the industrial age. This notion of "Old Mexico" unblemished by modernity appealed to many artists concerned in the early 20th century with the mechanization and materialism of American culture. It was also a vision that was packaged as an exotic getaway for many American tourists. It is worth contrasting the quaint appeal of an indigenous woman laboring over her tortillas with the actual industrialization of the tortilla industry. By 1956, this woman would likely have bought her tortillas in small stacks from the local tortillería, saving about six hours of processing, grinding, and cooking tortilla flour.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1956
- graphic artist
- Charlot, Jean
- printer
- Kistler, Lynton R.
- ID Number
- GA*23355.05
- catalog number
- 23355.05
- accession number
- 299563
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center